For the past decade, Sun Valley has been the preferred site of annual Team Mojo multi-day mountain biking epics. (See our most recent series, “Real Mountain Biking, in Real Mountains.”)

Now comes word that Ketchum and Sun Valley will host the 2011 and 2012 USA Cycling Mountain Biking National Championships, spanning the very same five days in late July that Team Mojo habitually picks for its “national hardships.” We would much appreciate a finders’ fee! (Or maybe free tickets?)

After Boundary Creek got done wringing us out, we headed to the bucolic little burg of Stanley, hard by the Salmon River. First on the agenda was finding a camp site. There are plenty of campgrounds off Highway 75 just beyond Stanley and we had little trouble getting one within 200 feet of the river. We jumped in to cool down; the water was unexpectedly warm even though the river seemed a bit high and the current was strong.

What Stanley lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. Our fave place for dinner is the Bridge Street Grill, which has a deck right out over the river where there’s some kind of steel bridge — no guard rails — that looks for all the world like a girder laid sideways over the gap. Motorbikes, scooters, small children … they all crossed the bridge, the latter even playing a game of tossing flowers into the river, then running to the other side of the bridge to see them pass beneath in the current. Ah the simple joys of youth — if you don’t fall in, that is. We seemed a lot more worried about the prospect than they did.

I’ve gotten to the point where I avoid eating meat if I can, but that can be a bit of a stretch in a place like Stanley, Idaho. The only veggie thing on the menu was a mushroom burger. I’ve liked most mushroom burgers I’ve eaten, but once in the similarly carnivorous small town of Winthrop WA I ordered a mushroom burger that subsequently arrived containing a huge steak patty with a portobello mushroom on top. So I figured on asking our Stanley waiter what kind of mushrooms the burger came with. I’m thinking maybe portobello, maybe shiitake. Perhaps the morels were already in. Button, crimini and porcini I would probably take a pass on.

“So,” says I, “what kind of mushrooms are in the mushroom burger?”

The waiter, who later turned out to be an actual bull rider called in when the regular help was sick, thought for a moment and said, “Um … non-hallucinogenic?”

You can see why we love this place.

I went with the BBQ chicken sandwich, which was quite tasty. And we left our cowpoke friend, clearly out of his element but endearingly solicitous of our every request, a big tip.

At dinner we asked around for a place to get breakfast, and everyone agreed that would be the bakery.

“What’s it called?” we asked.

“The Bakery,” they said.

“Just … the Bakery?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s the only place I ever eat breakfast,” our waiter chimed in.

“There isn’t any other place to eat breakfast,” a couple at the next table noted. [A complete list of Stanley dineries here.]

Later we spoke with the owner of the Grill, who acknowledged he’d tried serving breakfast for a while but “it didn’t work out.” Customers were not the problem — it was getting help.

“People come and go,” he said. “You never know if someone’s going to report for work or not.”

We asked him the population of Stanley. He thought for a bit.

“It must be up around 70,” he said. “A Mormon family moved in with 8 kids.”

After sleeping soundly with the whispering river providing soothing white noise, we rose and hustled over to The Bakery. It was packed with cyclists, largely because of a big road ride in town. But we got seated fairly expeditiously and enjoyed a huge bowl of steaming oatmeal with berries. They also had signature hearty fare, including flapjacks the size of frisbees. We finished up and were soon on our way. Which was good, because we had a long ride ahead of us.

A few years back we’d spent time in Stanley planning to do Big Boulder/Little Boulder, an epic backcountry loop that requires an hour-plus drive from Stanley just to the starting point on East Fork Salmon River Road, 18 miles in from Highway 75. We’d gotten too late of a start to do the loop, though, which meant an out-and-back, or up-and-down, ride on Big Boulder. That was a screaming downhill, one of the best we’ve ever had. But it left us craving the entire ride.

Because the Big Boulder downhill is so spectacular — 6.5 miles of non-stop ripping over buff singletrack with G-force straightaways — you’re forced to make a decision at the start. Do you go up Little Boulder and down Big, or the other way around? Since we’d already done the down Big thing, we decided to go up Big and down Little. The ride profile showed that to be a lot longer downhill, even if our local tipster (Don Wiseman) had warned us of lots of rocky sections.

The primary thing to remember, no matter which direction you take, is to park at the dirt-road turnoff from East Fork Salmon River Road. You do NOT want to ride the dirt road to or from the trailhead at the END of the loop, no matter which way you do it.

We parked and geared up. It was approaching 80 degrees and I was thinking, another hot one.

“Should I take along my rain jacket?” I asked Jim.

“What do you think?” he said.

Jim always answers what he considers boneheaded questions with a Zen koan or something, which is only fair because by now he knows my chief problem is that I don’t think.

“There’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s pushing 80 degrees out. What’s the point?” I asked him back. He just smiled and rolled his eyes.

Doing the dirt road up to the trail head at the start of the ride isn’t a bad thing. You get to stretch your legs a bit and, dusty and uninspiring though it be, you’re fresh and looking forward to a day of spectacular riding. We were kind of hoping one of the hikers or good ol’ boys who passed us on the way would give us a ride, but no luck. Yeah it would’ve been cheating, but an honest kind of cheating.

The climb up Big Boulder is gentle, beautiful, scenic and altogether pleasant. About half way up, the sky began to darken. Then it got darker. In a few minutes it was all but black. Lightning crackled to the northwest, thunder rattled the ridge and fat splotches of sloppy rain began pelting down on us.

Even though we were riding carbon bikes, Jim cautioned we could get struck by lightning or otherwise imperiled if lightning chose a tree close by. We crawled down off the trail and took refuge in a small stand of pine.

“You don’t want to be near the tall trees,” Jim said. They’re likeliest to get hit.

Jim got out his rain gear and was soon covered up. When I pulled out my yellow Patagonia jacket, he did a double-take.

“Glad I followed your advice,” I said.

The rain was coming down hard but Jim, who once was a rock climber and professional mountain guide, scanned the horizon and said, “It’ll be over in 15 minutes or so.” For the time being, all we could do was sit and wait.

When the rain did stop, the skies opened back up and we resumed riding, Jim said, “I think that’s the last of it for today.” That he was right was a good thing, because we still had five or six hours ahead of us.

Apres le deluge, climbing Big Boulder Creek trail.

Eventually we crested on Big Boulder, providing gobsmacking 360s of stunning mountain ranges, lakes and meadows below. It was time to start heading down.

Near the top, views all around.

There are indeed rocky sections of trail on the ride down Little Boulder, but our Mojos were sucking up everything like cotton candy and we were maintaining whooping velocity on the route to Frog Lakes. Then I heard some scraping from my brakes. I stopped and gave the wheels a spin. The front rotor had serious rub.

I ride Magura Martas on the Mojo and love ‘em. But when the pads go, there’s no forgiveness. I looked into the caliper and saw telltale shiny filings from metal on metal. We were miles from our destination, with around 4,000 feet of elevation to drop.

Fortunately, in packing for the trip Jim and I had both included spare pads in our packs. I pulled out my set and Jim slapped them in while I held the fork aloft. Good as new, we were ready to roll in 5 minutes. Nevertheless, it was a good reminder of Rule No. 1 for epic riding in the back country: Bring all the spare parts you can reasonably pack. For me that means a dropout and brake pads as well as a tube and patch kit. I know guys who include rotors, rear derailleurs and even chains in the mix, but I’ve always found workarounds for those catastrophes. And a few inches of duct tape, a collection of zip ties, a first aid kit and of course wrenches and tools accompany me wherever I ride.

But you knew all this, right?

The long descent on Little Boulder is a wonderful ride, but not — on this occasion at least — without its drawbacks. The late spring had left the trail a complete bog in numerous places, worsened by post holes and generous deposits of effluent from horses. The only saving grace was that we could often (not always) ride around the mess, and that we were going down instead of up. Momentum was our friend.

Dropping back down toward Frog Lakes.

Finally we dropped onto a rollicking desert trail that took us back to the East Fork road, which we rode back up to the car.

Our Mojos were in pretty sad shape from the “horsepuckey crossings,” but it had been a fine ride. Would we do it again? Probably not the whole loop. For this specific loop we think up-and-back on Big Boulder is the best choice, giving you the better payoff for your pain.

But we have in mind another variation in this drainage that has us itching to get back asap. There’s always another ride to report, and we can dream of the day we return to Big Boulder Creek.

Distance: 27 miles plus. Elevation gain: 5020 feet.

[Tomorrow: We head to the panhandle!]

]]>http://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/08/sun-valley-mountain-biking-day-4-big-boulderlittle-boulder-and-all-the-in-between-boulders-too/feed/0Sun Valley Mountain Biking, Day 3: Return to Boundary Creekhttp://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/08/sun-valley-mountain-biking-day-3-return-to-boundary-creek/
http://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/08/sun-valley-mountain-biking-day-3-return-to-boundary-creek/#commentsWed, 11 Aug 2010 06:01:15 +0000http://bikeintelligencer.com/?p=4133[In which our intrepid duo unexpectedly meets up with an equally hell-bent Seattle clan; encounters some lanky 29ers killing the climb; discovers the sartorial gifts of Club Ride Apparel; eludes the deadly sting of water snakes in a high alpine lake; cruises a ghostly burn-out and bombs a legendary descent, ending with a stunning re-acquaintance and sharing of old times.]

Older. Wiser. Better?

Sun Valley’s most famous mountain bike ride is the Fisher Creek loop, which in five trips there I’ve never actually done per se. You climb up Fisher Creek road, then circle back and absolutely rip one of the world’s great cross-country downhills, Williams Creek. The reason I’ve never done Fisher is because I typically combine it with a wider adventure, including one of my all-time favorite XC rides, Boundary Creek.

We’ve rhapsodized before about Boundary, running a 2004 version as one of our “Classics” during this most recent trip even as we rode it again real-time. It’s a true epic: 6 to 7 hours long, 27-plus hard miles, with just about every type of terrain you’ll encounter riding cross-country, from powdery singletrack to rocky descents. In 2005 it even added a forest burn with the epic Fisher-Williams fire. The good news is that stuff is already coming back, even though the trail remains post-burn limp and sandy.

Green is returning to 2005's Fisher Creek burn.

There’s even a big-chainring road ride at the beginning. The way we do it is to take Highway 75 to the Williams Creek trailhead, then ride road around 6 miles to Boundary Creek’s trailhead. You climb Boundary all the way to Casino Lakes, take Marten Creek down to Warm Springs, cross a vast ethereal meadow and then dive through the Fisher burn to Williams and back to the trailhead.

You have a number of options in this region just outside of the bustling little burg of Stanley. You could do Ants Basin, a giant shuttle. You could go up Fisher Creek and take Warm Springs down to Robinson Bar, another big shuttle (you’d get to see Carole King’s for-sale estate this way). You could take Boundary up to the Casino Lakes intersection and take one of the Casino trails down.

Of them all, Boundary is the most challenging, epic and rider-specific. No shuttle is required.

We were gearing up when who should pull up but a pickup jammed with bikes … from Seattle! It was a group ride of fellow Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance bros. Unbeknownst to us, a gang had come over and was renting a house near Ketchum for the week. We found this out just by striking up a conversation, which we always try to do at trailheads. You never know what connections you have in this small, small world.

In this case, our old riding buddy David James was the link. When someone mentioned he was part of the group, Dave popped his head around and we got to say hello. Some of the gang was doing classic Fisher, others were crossing the meadow to Warm Springs and down to Robinson Bar. It was going to be a memorable day for all. You can check out their adventures via Erik Alston’s posts on GotSingletrack.com.

Erik Alston's Seattle group at Fisher-Williams.

The road ride at the beginning of Boundary isn’t much fun. The road lacks shoulder space, but vehicles tend to give you wide berth in Idaho. It helped that a big road bike event was going on in Stanley; there were plenty of compatriots out flashing colors strung out along 75.

We registered at the Boundary Creek trailhead and began the long climb up. Around 9 miles up, the climb is a gradual ascent punctuated by a few wicked switchbacks. Most of it is rideable, and when I say that I usually mean by someone other than me. Especially on this long, long ride, you don’t want to burn out your jets early on.

On the way Jim reminded me of a pushing technique he had been introduced to by a riding buddy we would eventually hook up with in northern Idaho. Instead of the usual technique of pushing a bike alongside, left hand on bars, right hand on saddle (or whatever), with this maneuver you reverse the bike and push it backwards up the hill, both hands on the bars.

A new way of pushing up the steeps.

It feels funny at first and looks even funnier. But there’s an innate efficiency to the process that immediately clicks. Despite Jim’s snickers and ridicule, I found myself adapting to it quickly. Steering is at first a bit awkward, but soon enough I was negotiating rocks, step-ups and switchbacks with little trouble. Because it requires reversing the bike, it’s only practical for extended pushes. But try it sometime — you may like it.

As we continued to climb, the scenery got more and more stunning. Your backdrop is Idaho’s majestic Sawtooth range. Snow still strewed the peaks, and the morning sun gave an iridescent glow to the bluish massif. We don’t have mountains like this on the West Coast. Jim’s a Colorado native and says the Sawtooths are the closest he knows comparable to the commanding sweep of the Rockies.

The higher you climb Boundary Creek, the further your jaw drops.

About two-thirds of the way up a group of riders, led by a powerful pro (we guessed from his colors), came rolling by. They were strung out along the hillside, but to their credit all were riding all the way to the top. Several — the tall ones — had 29ers. A couple were out of Tucson, one woman was Australian, and the rest were locals. We’d see them again at the top but for now they were way off the front.

There’s a false summit on Boundary where you think whew, the climbing’s over at least. Far from it. You’ve got another thousand feet or so of really steep stuff before you crest for the best lunch spot.

Atop Boundary, you look down on the Sawtooths.

We encountered the group eating and laughing on slickrock boulders — perched on a ridge that made it seem like you were looking down on the Sawtooths. One guy in particular caught our interest. Dressed in a buttoned and collared short-sleeve shirt and natty creased shorts, he looked like he’d just stepped out of a Herb Allen conference seminar. It turned out he was Mike Herlinger, the founder of Club Ride Apparel, a clothing line represented in the Northwest by none other than former distance champion John Stamstad. We took Mike’s photo (he’s on the right) and made a mental note to follow up once we got back home.

“You don’t even look like you broke a sweat,” we commented.

“It’s all in the attire,” he said with a smile.

Club Ride: Dressing well is the best revenge.

That reminded us of a previous ride we’d done in the area with a dapper Boeing engineer named Steve Van Patten. Throughout a day-long epic in blistering heat, Steve wore a long-sleeved pinstripe dress shirt. We had to admit, for all the eccentricity of dress, he brought a touch of class to the proceedings.

The gang — whom we later learned comprised in part Team Niner-Ergon — soon departed after donning helmet cams (one had a GoPro Hero mounted on his handlebars; see video here). They were headed down Casino Lakes, the opposite way from us but an alternative we plan to do the next time. For now we were looking forward to a monster downhill.

If there’s such a thing as a challenging descent, Boundary Creek is it. Rock gardens abound, and the late spring had left creek crossings dicey. It’s fun, but you don’t want to hurt yourself or even get a mechanical this far from anywhere, and you don’t really get a lot of flow. I was heartened by Jim’s recollection of several crashes I’d had last time. This time out I stayed upright. Older, yes. Wiser, yes. Better? It must have been the Mojo.

Sometimes ya eats the rocks, sometimes the rocks eat you.

One interlude I always take advantage of is an alpine lake fairly early on, where you can take a cool dip that brings down the core temp fast and relaxes you for the rest of the ride. I had jumped in and was floating on my back when Jim, scanning out across the lake, said bemusedly, “Hmmm, there’s a water snake out there.”

A snake! Where there’s one, there’s got to be more! After I’d finished splashing to shore, cracking up Jim to no end, he explained that we probably weren’t talking water moccasins here. In any case, I was ready to roll on in no time at all.

A snake you say? Yeeeoooowwwww!

We rode down, down, down … through the ghostly burn, where underbrush is coming back to life … through creek crossings that were higher than normal … through the vast upper meadow bowl … up riser after riser on Fisher. The latter, coming late in the ride and the day, was leaving me pretty gassed, wondering if the intersection with Williams is ever going to show up.

But then you’re there.

It admittedly would be nice to do Williams a bit fresher. It’s one ride that invites speed so tantalizing you simply cannot resist the perfectly timed berms and roller-coaster straightaways. For the most part Williams has terrific sight lines and plenty of clearance. And you can go as fast as reflexes and fear factor permit.

You finally break out into a meadow at the bottom, then have a little 200-foot climb before the final rip to the trailhead. As much as I love this ride, it had pummeled me into submission by the end. I guess that’s one thing that keeps bringing me back. Maybe one of these days I’ll get the better of it rather than the other way around. Either way, it’s an incomparable mountain biking experience.

Warm Springs meadow, in the eye of God.

Back at the trailhead we’re packing up when we hear a voice … “Jim? Jim Lyon? Paul? Is that you?”

We turned around to see none other than Mr. Sartorial Splendor himself, Steve Van Patten.

After much exclaiming, hooting and greeting, we learned he was with the Seattle clan, having just been dropped back off at his camper after doing the Robinson Bar option. He had a different bike than in 2004, sans rack, but the camper was the same and Steve still was living large.

We told him the story of Club Ride Apparel.

“Was the material cotton?” he asked.

We weren’t positive but thought it a blend.

Steve shook his head. “Has to be cotton,” he said. “Cotton all the way.”

So there you have it. The last mountain biker in America to wear cotton on day-long rides. Boundary Creek truly has it all.

Because of our late spring and/or non-existent summer, however you want to characterize it, in Year 2010 of the Great Northwest, we were even more out of shape than usual for late July. Jim was playing it cautious, keeping our entry rides in the medium-range level of distance and altitude. The nice thing about Sun Valley is that you can do a loop and then, if you’re feeling like more, add another, different loop of greater or lesser challenge right in the same basin. It’s really remarkable for that. There really is that much riding around.

We had been scheduled to tackle the forbidding Bowery Creek Loop up the road past Galena Pass. But it rained heavily during the night and kept spigot-showering through the early morning hours. There was no telling when the rain would let up, and in any case we had no idea what conditions were like up on Galena, so we lowered our sights to closer to town.

As it turned out, we were glad we did.

Pondering an innovative new route.

Our first option was Imperial Gulch — Greenhorn Gulch, a lovely and classic Sun Valley ride that takes you up through lodge pole pine, runs you along a ridge with sweeping views, then drops you back down with a series of swoopy switchbacks and fast little runs through meadows and woods.

The departure point is a large parking lot at the Greenhorn Gulch trail head. You take Highway 75 south from Ketchum for 6 miles to Greenhorn Gulch Road and follow it to the end. You’ll find lots of hikers, mountain bikers and dog-walkers at the trail head, which has an outhouse as well.

Coming from Seattle, you expect after a downpour to find trails slippery and puddled. In Sun Valley we could hardly tell it rained. The trail surface was not only dry but nicely tacked up — no dust! We cruised around the loop in near-record time, pausing only at the upper junction for a very civilized photo at table and chairs. All we needed were a couple of cold ones, and we’d be right out of one of those outdoorsy beer commercials.

A couple of tall cold ones was all we needed.

We couldn’t take it too easy because our pals the bugs were still hot on our trail. Jim was starting to kvetch about the unfairness of it all, how I somehow got passed up for him when I was the fleshier, flabbier, presumably more succulent member of Team Mojo. He had even brought along a little cannister of spray in his pack. No matter how much he lathered on, though, the bugs still lapped him up.

The last time we did the ridge section was at the end of a long, really hot day, when I’d run out of water and we made an unfortunate routing error — continuing on the up-and-down-and-up-again ridge instead of dropping down to the lower connector. This time we got it right, but you know what? I’ll remember the first time a lot more. Suffering imprints the gray cells far deeper.

The loopy joys of Greenhorn Gulch.

When we got back this time, we were actually just starting to get our Sun Valley rhythm. So Jim conjured up another loop — Cow Creek. It looked straightforward enough on the map, the only problem being we were following the map, not the recommended route.

We left from the Greenhorn Gulch trailhead but this time took a right at Cow Creek trail and headed up to a butte-like promontory. There was a lot more climbing than it looked at first, and when we came to a Y we were a bit puzzled. But a makeshift sign pointed us in what we thought was the right direction with crude Appalachian lettering: Cow C-R-I-C-K. There was no “Deliverance” theme, but things were about to get dicey.

Short on graphics, maybe, but getting the point across.

As we proceeded, the trail got sketchier and sketchier, till finally it disappeared altogether in a grass burn. We kept checking the map, and indeed we were on Cow Creek Trail. But it obviously wasn’t the mountain bike mecca that the route suggested.

We got off our bikes and beat the brushes for a bit, before Jim discovered the exit path. From there we dropped down a couple of steep switchbacks. Then the fun began.

Yee-haw! The rest of the trail, leading back to the parking lot, was a series of buckin’ bronco — or maybe it was bull-ridin’, given the name — bouldered downhills. You’d get through a patch and think, hey, that was intense! Now it’s time to ride!

Then you’d hit another. And another. Jim kept apologizing — “This isn’t what I figured on” — but I was having a great time. Until that one section. The one where I crashed.

It wasn’t a bad tumble. I was going pretty slow, which was part of the problem. The front wheel caught a doorstop that, with a bit more momentum, I would’ve rolled over easily. Instead the fork dived and I went over the bars.

If I’d been wearing full-finger gloves, I wouldn’t even have scratched my left index finger. As it was, I dug out a bit of skin and it was bleeding pretty bad. I also scraped my left shin and it was bleeding too. But I’ve been in lots worse crashes. I pulled my DIY first-aid kit out of my pack and put Neosporin on the cuts, bandaged my hand, took a shot of Arnica Montana and was ready to roll in no time.

[Please don't tell my wife about the crash, as she never reads this blog.]

There were even more boulder sections, but nothing too insurmountable. We cruised back to the trailhead, and I checked the sign. There it was: Cow Creek Trail, spelled American Textbook.

Jim, still scratching his head, consulted the map again and figured out where we went wrong. The traditional loop is to do Lodgepole Gulch (Mahoney Creek Trail) up and then ride down the part of Cow Creek Trail we rode up. That makes for a screaming downhill — sans the boulder fields.

I liked it this way. We’ll call it the Cow Creek Faceplant Option. Or: The Real Cow Crick.

When we got back to the trailhead we struck up a conversation with a tanned, sinewy couple in a Eurovan who knew their way around the area.

“Would you like a cold one?” she asked. “We’ve got Tecates in the fridge.”

It’d been a long time since I’d cracked open a Tecate, but I recalled back in the day it was a pretty tasty beer. When I took my first sip, I just about sprayed it back out. What happened, did Tecate get bought out by Rolling Rock? As Jim later put it, that’s as close as you can get to rat piss without being rodential.

Dude where's my beer?

Not to diss the hospitality of our new friends, though, because they saved our hides. We were thinking about doing Bowery the next day, but they warned us off. Too much suffering for too little gain; they suggested an out-and-back that sounded pretty good to us.

It would have to wait till the next time we came to town, though. For our third day out, it was time to start pinning the fun meter. Boundary Creek was calling our names, and we were all ears.

Elevation gain: 3340 feet. Miles: 19.2.

[Tomorrow: Boundary Creek revisited, with the unexpected reappearance of old friends.]

It’s a long day’s drive from Seattle to Ketchum, ID, around 680 miles. We packed Jim’s CR-V to the gills and headed out at 6 a.m., arriving nearly 12 hours later. After grabbing some food in Atkinson’s grocery in town (BigWood Bakery granola and cookies highly recommended), we pitched our tents at the Corral Creek campground just outside of town. It’s free, quiet and eminently convenient. Despite coming from sea level to a mile high in elevation, we slept well.

Upper meadow near Baker Lake

It’s always a good idea, upon arriving in Sun Valley from sea level, to breathe in slowly. For our first outing that meant a fairly tame, half-fire-road, half-singletrack leg-stretcher called Curly‘s, just outside of town near the Easley hot springs. You head up north from Ketchum on Highway 75 for 15 miles and turn left onto Baker Creek Road. There’s a parking turnout just a short way up the road.

While we were getting ready to roll, up drives an SUV with two Boise riders wearing racing colors from Reed Cycle. As they geared up, we couldn’t help but notice that one — a powerfully lean, dark-haired girl — had a big patch of gray duct tape just below her knee. When Jim asked her about it, she laughed and said, somewhat cryptically, “There’s a real bandage underneath.”

All summer long we’ve been reading Stieg Larsson’s posthumously best-selling trilogy about “The Girl.” The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Girl Who Played with Fire. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

This was The Girl with the Duct Tape Band-Aid. Friendly enough, but the kind you wouldn’t want to mess with.

We jumped on our Mojos and headed up the road to the turnoff (to the left) of the jeep road beginning Curly’s Loop. We don’t know who Curly is, but we thank him for this little acclimatizer. The road is not really steep nor really long, but both are definitely more pronounced at altitude than they would be back home. We were huffing well beyond what our moderate output merited, but that was the point: Get used to it.

Halfway up the road, who should zoom by but the Girl With the Duct Tape Band-Aid. Make that “Without.” We couldn’t help notice it was missing.

“It fell off!” she exclaimed, moving by us so fast we barely caught a glimpse.

There’s a story there. Maybe not one that will put 23 million books in print, but we were naturally curious nonetheless.

Don't forget to smell the flowers

Just when you start to wonder if you missed the singletrack turnoff, there it is on the left. (You do need to pay attention.) Then, after a short climb ends in a promontory, you start a thrashing descent over sometimes steep, sometimes rocky, often switchbacky singletrack. Don’t forget to admire the wildflowers along the way, including a delicate white-petaled beauty with black (or deep purple) inlays — the white mariposa lily.

You can really rip this descent or take it easy — your choice. But its loose surface and sudden corners should not be taken lightly.

The trail eventually dumps you right into someone’s back yard. A couple was out watering when we rode in — they nodded hello, barely reacting to our presence. You pick up a flat access road paralleling the highway, and it takes you back to your car.

The whole thing took less than two hours and left us thinking. While we did not want to overdo things our first day out, this was like giving us bread sticks for our first meal. Fortunately, Jim had an Accessory Plan.

You have to understand that for someone who does not actually live there, Jim knows Sun Valley as well as if not better than most of the locals. Employing a process over the years he calls “Filling in the map,” Jim has ridden nearly all of the traditional routes, improvised his own and trail-blazed a couple that simply do not show up in the guide books.

One ride is never enough

We could head on up the road a piece and do Baker Lake, he said. It would have to be an out-and-back, but it would give us another 2k of climbing and bust our lungs a little wider.

We drove up Baker Creek Road another seven miles to a crowded trailhead for West Fork Norton Creek — we got the absolute last parking spot. Fortunately, all the vehicles were for hikers bound for Norton Lakes — a different trail, off to the right. We headed to the left, toward Baker Lake.

The trail was all up and mostly rideable, although our shortness of breath and the 95-degree heat, combined with moto’d-out sections of trail that made it feel like you were trying to get traction on split peas, left us pushing parts we normally would ride. Conditions also were ripe for Sun Valley’s least hospitable population: Bugs. We got horse flies, deer flies, mosquitoes, gnats, you name it. I’m quite lucky in that bugs don’t, erm, bug me. Most of the time they just circle around. When they land, they usually take back off right away. If they actually bite me, I don’t show the bites. A couple of times horse flies — Yowch! — got in pretty good nips. “That means you’re bit, my friend,” Jim told me. But I never itched, and nothing ever showed up.

Jim is just the opposite. Bugs love the guy. Every time we stopped to catch our breath or admire the view, Jim turned into a hazy column of small buzzing critters.

Endless singletrack you say ...

We got up to 9,500 feet and decided to call it a day. The ride back down was a hoot, featuring those little doubles that the motorcycles somehow install by default, some rocky rooty sections, creek crossings and laid-back meadow runs.

All in all, a satisfying day. We scampered back to town, where the new Ketchum Y(MCA), which looks for all the world like a private spa you might find in, say, Dubai, awaited us with $5 showers. We discovered our first casualty of the trip: Our shoulders. Lobster-red, and broiled in the same manner. I don’t use sunscreen, considering it one of the great corporate scams perpetrated on a gullible American public. Jim does use it, however. He was more burnt than me.

We concluded about the only thing that would have saved our skin that day would have been duct tape.

But you know, that stuff just doesn’t stay on.

Day’s elevation gain: Approximately 3,500 feet. Mileage: 18.
[TOMORROW: Further acclimatization, with somewhat less huffing, at royal Imperial Gulch and the decidedly less regal Cow Crick.]

For 10 days Team Mojo took to the road, exploring Idaho’s far-flung trails in Sun Valley, Stanley, and the all but undocumented panhandle hard by the Canadian border. We left the MacBook behind. The iPhone was almost always out of range. We seldom had Wi-Fi. Our fingers were for gripping the bars, not typing. We did 9-mile climbs and 18-mile downhills. We did forest-carpeted singletrack, we bucked boulders and roots, jumped in alpine lakes, cruised charred sticks of timber burns and grunted up 10,000-foot-high ridges. We crossed raging creeks nearly to our waists, handing our bikes to one another as we tried to maintain footing on mossy rocks we could not see. We got black and blue from crashes, brown from mud, green from meadows and red from when Jim accidentally set the soft fleshy underside of his forearm on a Magura rotor after a screaming 4-mile descent in 92-degree temps.

We got up, ate, rode, ate, rode some more, showered, ate, went to bed. Day after day. In broiling sun, in crackling lightning, in booming thunderclaps, in sodden drizzle. We abused our carbon Ibis Mojos, our Ergon packs and our Sidi shoes — to say nothing of our sunburned shoulders, abraded legs and bludgeoned feet. We were in heaven even when we felt like hell. Distance in miles: About 150. Accumulated elevation gain in feet: Around 25,000. Happiness in cackles: Long into the night.

We chose well. Somewhat belatedly, Idaho is coming into its own as a mountain biking destination. We’ve been riding around Sun Valley since the mid-1990s, abetted early by faxed notes from Seattle mountain biking scribe John Zilly, who drew maps by hand of trails around town and wrote the first mountain-bike guides (no longer available) to the area. In an age of boundless hype, the Idaho Sawtooth region has always struck us as vastly under-appreciated. The endless cross-country trails, gobsmacking views of the Sawtooths and White Clouds, and the spot-on climate have brought us back time and again. [Even as we explored new routes this time we posted "classic" past adventures on BikeIntelligencer.]

John Zilly, circa 1995

Because it lacked mountain bike parks with lifts and downhill runs, Sun Valley missed the freeride revolution. You don’t read about it in the glossy magazines, or even places like PinkBike. But for diversity of riding otherwise, and natural challenges unmatchable by human-crafted features, Sun Valley remains a favorite playground for real mountain bikers, riding real mountains.

And things are changing. A go-anywhere shuttle service has popped up, the pink-van Mountain Fairy Shuttle, that will take your gang around Sun Valley and its more rugged sister, Stanley, for reasonable fees. There’s talk of putting in bike lift service and DH trails in Sun Valley’s legendary ski areas. The Chamber of Commerce is getting the message that biking is the summer equivalent of skiing in terms of tourist promotion and dollars.

There’s debate among the locals who don’t want another Whistler. Neither do we. On the other hand, this is a region that every mountain biker, even the ones who get their verts sitting still, deserves to experience.

For now, you’ll find a minimum of coddling in the Sun Valley region. Give yourself a couple of days to adjust to the altitude and you can make it as challenging as you like, from rollicking cruises along powdery singletrack in the woods to monster hike-a-bikes across scree-laden alligator-back ridges in the outback. Trust us, Sun Valley is as good as it gets.

]]>http://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/08/sun-valley-2010-real-mountain-biking-in-real-mountains/feed/0Classic Mountain Bike Rides: Red Warrior — Mars Ridgehttp://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/07/classic-mountain-bike-rides-red-warrior-%e2%80%94-mars-ridge/
http://bikeintelligencer.com/2010/07/classic-mountain-bike-rides-red-warrior-%e2%80%94-mars-ridge/#commentsThu, 29 Jul 2010 06:46:35 +0000http://bikeintelligencer.com/?p=3985[We've gone riding! For 10 days Bike Intelligencer is mountain biking in places so remote an iPhone 4 can't even find a signal to drop. We'll report back on our return, but in the meantime we're running some "BI Classics" from past adventures. See you on the trails!]

Red Warrior — Mars Ridge Loop, Sun Valley, Idaho

Regrouping, Valor Gives Way to Discretion; Return to Ketchum; The Extraterrestrial Mars Ridge and Rambunctious Red Warrior Beckon; Where Is Jason?

The next morning we did further consultation. At this point I was ready for a return to the comforts of civilization. The East Salmon Fork had seemed just too far out there. There were other rides I wanted to explore in Ketchum. I suggested heading down valley and regrouping at Corral Creek.

Jason went along with it – at least, it seemed that way. But he may not have been too happy with the arrangement, and maybe I was a bit presumptuous. We hadn’t done Boulder Creek-Fisher/Williams, one of the planet’s truly great rides. And there were other rides Jason wanted to “route-find” around Stanley. But I kinda steamrollered ahead, a bit insensitive, and came later to regret it.

Jason wanted to grab breakfast in Stanley, so Jim and I motored on down and grabbed Corral Creek campsite No. 9, which I mistakenly remembered as 7. After Jim pitched his tent we started back to town, passing Jason on the way and giving him the wrong campsite number. It was then that Jason laid a bombshell on us: He wanted to take a rest day. Hit the hot springs, hang out in town, collect his thoughts. Besides, he said, the rides around Sun Valley were all pretty much the same. The last comment was a subtle jab. When we’d been planning this trip as a free-form expedition around Stanley, I’d expressed pretty much that exact sentiment. But now that I was here, I didn’t really believe it. There was lots of exploring to do around Sun Valley. It was just a little needle from Jason, and I have to say I deserved it.

I have nothing against rest days in general. But on epic adventures to places like Moab, Tahoe, Bend, Sun Valley or wherever, all the rest I’m interested in happens between daylight. Jim is pretty much the same way. In reality we suspected Jason just wanted some time out. And although he was too polite to say it, we figured he also was mightily pissed. I realized I’d kind of run roughshod over his Idaho Escape. The rest of the trip I spent having a heart-to-heart with myself.

I wish I’d tried harder to talk Jason out of the rest day, but figured he knew best and we’d be able to cap off the trip with a mondo ride the next day. For the current day’s outing, Jim suggested Red Warrior, which neither of us had done and was at the top of my list. Every time I told someone I’d ridden in Sun Valley, they’d ask: Didja do Red Warrior? I began to feel like a tourist who’d gone to Athens and not seen the Acropolis. The route of choice took us up to Lodgepole Pine, then Mars Ridge, then back down Red Warrior. It looked like a good ride. It turned out to be something a whole lot better.

The ride begins with a creek crossing where your feet just have to get wet. Then there is a gentle climb with innumerable shallower creek crossings. Finally you start some serious climbing up Lodgepole, past Mahoney and to the ridge.

Jim and I had done Mars Ridge the year earlier, but I’d forgotten the nasty hike-a-bike sections and, for that matter, the astounding 360-degree view at the top. I’ve been on a lot of 360s, including most of Washington’s, and while the experience at, say, Juniper Ridge with its 4 peaks is uniquely inspiring, Mars Ridge goes everything a few steps further. First there’s the stark quality of the rock itself. The eerie sienna red, devoid of trees and shrubs, bracketed by mountain ranges all around, and mountain ranges beyond mountain ranges, and views for hundreds of miles. Wow. And the price of admission is just a couple of grunts up scree-laden risers.

It’s times like this I want to spend the rest of my life on a mountain bike. We stood there taking it all in and put off as long as we could the start of the descent. When you’re riding you always want to keep moving. But there are times when your head says stay just a little bit longer.

From the crest you ride down a straight and fast roller, then wind up some switchbacks, then down again, and up and so on. Eventually you come to the crossroads with Red Warrior. This is the section listed on the map as “Downhill Only,” and on the ride up I’d wondered why. In NorCal what that usually means is that hikers have managed to get what would otherwise be a great trail closed on the downhill direction to riders.

But Red Warrior is downhill only because it’d be nothing but a hike with wheels going up. The thing is steep. And rocky. And loose. Into the first couple of sections I was already going too fast for the Turner, whose tail was bouncing around like there was silly putty in the rear tire. They say to learn to let the bike do the leading, which is great until the bike leads you into a tree. I was trying to rein the Turner in. But at the same time, I was having way too much fun to want to slow down.

A couple of weeks earlier I’d ridden one of my favorite downhills anywhere, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (Saxon Creek) at Lake Tahoe. Red Warrior has to rank close behind Toad’s. It’s not quite as sphincter-clenching and hairball as Toad’s. But it’s steep and it’s long. At the bottom I was laughing out loud and whooping like a kid on a carny ride. Hey, can we do that one again? Jim gave me a high-five and shouted, “If that’s what you call too much of the same, give me more!”

After the ride we checked out the hot springs, then drove back to town. When we got to the campsite, we found no trace of Jason. No car, no tent. Just a note on the campsite marker. I knew right away what it would say. Jason had left for Seattle. Too much to do back home, he said. He was planning a big ride in Switzerland and needed to pull together the loose ends.

I felt pretty bad, figuring Jason’s Dream Trip had kind of disintegrated from my bullheadedness. We do what we do. I left him voice mail apologizing and saying I hoped he didn’t hate us. When I finally got to talk with him, Jason was pretty cool about the whole thing. For those of us who tend to live in pigeon holes, Jason’s free-spiritedness can be kind of unsettling. But you can’t deny it: If your life had worked out that you could live every day exactly the way you wanted to, why would you bother with anything else?

[We've gone riding! For 10 days Bike Intelligencer is mountain biking in places so remote an iPhone 4 can't even find a signal to drop. We'll report back on our return, but in the meantime we're running some "BI Classics" from past adventures. See you on the trails!]

Sex, MTB and Rock ‘n Roll

[Continuing our Idaho adventure, we head toward Stanley and ride the best XC downhill this side of the Tahoe Rim Trail. Oh! Oh! Oh! Idaho!]

I’m not one of those people who subscribes to XYZ being better than sex. You know, chocolate is better than sex. Paragliding is better than sex. Yoga is better than sex. Say all you like, analogize from here till Tuesday. Nothing, really, is better than sex.

But when it comes to the Boundary Creek loop above Stanley, Idaho, the line gets very very thin.
On their Idaho tour a couple of weeks earlier, Anthony and Mire had ridden a route up Boundary Creek and down Martin and Williams Creek trails just south of Stanley. Mire’s mention of a 12k top-out perked up my ears. I’ve only been at 12k once on a mountain bike, above Telluride. The prospect of getting that far up had me asking what, where and how?

Anthony tipped us to talk to the folks at Elephant’s Perch in Ketchum about the ride, and we got the low-down. It didn’t look too complicated, but it’s not a ride talked about or written up much. There’s a blurb in the appendix to “Good Dirt,” a book of mtb rides around Sun Valley (John Zilly apparently doesn’t sell his guides there any more), but otherwise nothing to indicate the magnificence and splendor of this glorious quest.

We got up early, broke camp and headed out for Stanley, a tiny backwater 60 miles up Hwy 75 from Sun Valley. We got close to the Fish Hatchery, where the EP guy had told us to turn off, but saw no signs indicating the Williams Creek trailhead. Jim wisely flagged down a pickup who gave us the word. There was a sign, yes, but only one, and it was on the north side of the entrance. The Idaho one-sign rule was still in force, but to even things out I guess they’d put this one to the north rather than the south.

I had voted, as I always do, for the van to be at the terminus rather than exodus of the ride. Since we had no shuttle, and I wouldn’t have shuttled anyway, and since I’m a former roadie and Jim rides road all the time commuting to Lynnwood High, well, you guessed right. We big-ringed it 5 miles up the highway to the Boundary Creek trailhead. On the way Jim’s chain was skipping annoyingly, but on the telltale every third turn of the crank. That said sticky link, and with my Park tool I soon had it unstuck. I carry a full chain tool because the multis and cheapo tools tend to break the first time you use them, and you don’t want that to happen at 12k in the middle of nowhere.

Boundary Creek has a nice map-board at the trailhead, and from what we could tell the instructions du jour were, “Bear right.” We started climbing some pleasant singletrack that kept getting steeper and looser as we ascended. At one point we passed a couple of hikers and chatted. The guy told us he was a Colorado forest ranger who’d just retired after working his final year 1 day on, four days off. The reason: He’d wanted to retire but had 28 days of vacation and 57 days of sick leave, which they said he had to use before retirement could become official. So he stuck around working 8 hours a week for a year, but getting paid full-time. Now there’s a shift we all could use.

Up higher we ran into a couple young guys on a group hike, looking for their sidekick Pat. We told them we’d seen no sign of anyone and wondered how they’d gotten fragmented. At one point the trail breaks out on a scenic overview and you’re staring, drop-jawed, at the Sawtooth Mountains, looking so close you could almost cut your finger on them. The Sawtooth’s jagged relief makes it one of the most dramatic mountain ranges you’ll ever see. I’ve seen other Sawtooths around, including the North Cascades version, but this is the real deal. Jim kept saying, “Them there’s purty mountains.” With the constantly changing play of shadow on stone, they look different every time you view them.

Boundary Creek is one of those trails that gets tougher as it gets higher. At one point it intersected with the Casino Creek Trail and we ran into another contingent of the Lost Boys expedition. Not sure how experienced these folks were, and it seemed to be a Boy Scout kinda hike. They’d been up there for five days, camping out and doing the grand tour. But for them to get scattered all over the mountain seemed like sure folly. We told them we’d already run into the group down trail and wished them luck. “You’ve still got another 1,000 feet or so up,” one of them warned.

It was a lot of pushing. Even if it weren’t loose and stair-step rocky, the trail was too steep to ride in many places. Along the way we ran into a third group, the tail-draggers, and went through the Hike Update once again. “I don’t envy you guys riding that trail up ahead,” one of them warned us. “It’s a killer.”

Finally we topped out at 9,540 feet with a spectacular view of Casino Lakes, White Cloud Mountain and environs. We were nowhere near 12k, but one can understand Mire’s euphoria. You definitely feel up there. And let’s face it, the highest you can get (legally) in Washington State is 8k at Angel’s Staircase. At that elevation, 1,500 feet can make a big difference.

What I’m about to say about the rest of the ride is considered opinion. I don’t like to declare “the best this” and “the greatest that” because there are usually far too many variables in the equation to issue superlatives, and a lot of it comes down to personal taste anyway. The Boundary/Williams ride down ranks with my favorites anywhere. It’s very reminiscent of the Tahoe Rim Trail, with a lot of bouldery drops and rock gardens, twisty, fast singletrack, sandy subalpine trail conditions in great shape, all sloped downward enough so you don’t have to pedal much but not so steep that you lose your elevation too quickly. I was really riding in an altered state. The downhill goes on and on and on and just gets better and better and better.

At one point we stopped at an unnamed alpine lake and I quickly jumped in for a swim. The water was right at 72 degrees, almost swimming pool temperature (I like swim water on the cool side), the sun was shining, the lake was window-clear to its bottom. All was right with the world. Jim tried to snap my picture but timing on a digital camera is always dicey. He caught the splash at least.

At one point there’s a false spur veering off on a radical right into the bush (hey, sounds like I’m making a political statement here). Jim kept checking the topo map to make sure we were on track, but for once I wasn’t worried. I could stay lost on this ride for days and be happy as a toad in slime. We hopped onto Martin Creek Trail, which emptied out eventually in a big green meadow. Crossing that we came to Pigtail Creek and took some doubletrack to a ramshackle cabin ruins, the intersection with Williams Creek, which comprises the downhill bomb run of the hugely popular Fisher Creek ride.

More buff singletrack, more speed, more adrenalin. The Billy Idol song, “Rebel Yell,” started winding through my head (“She cried, More! More! More!”) You can’t rock ‘n roll any better than this. At the end you exit onto a dry marsh, then climb a little bluff, and you’re back to flying down the trail once again. I wish I could describe more exactly the experience but consider this: As I type these words, I’m smiling and laughing and feeling amped and warm all over. If you ever go anywhere in the vicinity of Sun Valley, this is the one ride you must do.

Back at the trailhead we whooped in delight and began chattering away in loud voices, recounting turn after berm after riser after slam. A group of girls in halter tops in the van next door kept looking over. Finally one asked, “Hey, didja have a good time or something?”

In any case, the holidays seem like a good time to run Bike Intelligencer “Classics” — that is, stories from our archives enabling readers to dream the big dreams about next spring, summer and fall. At the end of the day, all we have are our stories. If they involve bikes, they have to be good.

We’ll start with hands down the most memorable mountain bike adventure we’ve ever had, our 5-day stint in the Sun Valley-Stanley region of Idaho the summer of 2003. Because there isn’t much for the big-hit crowd in Sun Valley, it typically gets overlooked in a compendium of great MTB rides. Yet for everything BUT big hit, it’s the best place to ride phat. I took along the camcorder and helmet cam, and YouTube links are provided, but please forgive the lousy resolution. This is ancient equipment by today’s standards — the helmet cam alone took 8 AA batteries and didn’t even give TV resolution. Still, our humble package gives you an idea of the gut-sucking sweep of Idaho’s XC joys.

Afterglow

It’s a wrap, but not before running into the befittingly surnamed (in keeping with our theme of Idah-O) former Seattle SuperSonic John Hummer out thrashing the trails on a custom ti frame and then encountering that marvel of Mother Nature, the diarrhetic cow herd.

Right before we’d left Sun Valley, we’d taken a short ride out of camp so Jim could show me Armando’s Stump. It was at a trail intersection just off the main campground – a modest little thing, really. But it had taco’d Armando’s front wheel the year earlier when The Hammer, on one of his downhill slams, had a momentary mental lapse singing some Cult lyrics to himself while tapping out the drum solo on his handlebars. Jim took a commemorative photo of me standing over the stump, bike in hand, viewable on the Web page listed below.

I could easily have spent another week in Sun Valley, but those psychological handcuffs known as adult responsibilities beckoned. To get back in time for a dinner party Sunday evening, we’d have to leave Saturday afternoon. Jim scoped out a ride outside of Stanley that the book “Good Dirt” labeled “the next Fisher Creek” while warning to “get there before the crowds discover it.” We drove west of Stanley about 10 miles and turned off on dirt another five or so, putting us at the head of the Little Basin Creek loop. Moments after we pulled up, a pickup with two riders arrived. By the time we left in early afternoon, there were half a dozen vehicles with more arriving all the time. Apparently whole crowds were coming there to beat the crowds.

The loop was nearly all singletrack, starting with a middling climb through pine and meadow, then turning onto a long joyride of a descent with several creek crossings and some final fire road back to the parking area. Our two counterparts – one of whom had the tallest mountain biking frame I’d ever seen, a custom-built titanium Independent Fabrication hardtail — began the ride 15 minutes ahead of us. But we caught them on the first steep switchback and pushed our bikes together for a spell. It turned out the tall guy was just breaking in his bike and had chosen this for his introductory ride with clipless pedals (SPDs). It was a heckuva place for a clipless tutorial, but he was faring pretty well.

After we crested and took off ahead, Jim – who’d pushed up with the big fella – told me he was a former player for the Seattle SuperSonics. Turned out it was none other than John Hummer, a popular 6-10 forward/center from the ’70s era. I know his business partner, Ann Winblad, through her early relationship with Bill Gates. Hummer Winblad is one of the better known and savvier venture firms in the Bay Area.

John’s a congenial, talkative guy and I introduced myself at the first open meadow, snapping a photo of him crossing one of the creek bridges. We talked San Francisco and tech briefly, then got back to the serious stuff: Negotiating dirt and rock along babbling Little Basin and Basin Creeks while trying to keep our feet dry on the crossings.

When it comes to creek crossings, I usually try to ride. But I won’t get my Chris Kings or Burner pivots wet, that’s a losing proposition. So if I can find a log bridge or a rock-hopping pathway, I’ll do that. Jim, otoh, is more likely to simply shed his shoes and socks and walk across, which usually puts him on the other side faster than my putzing around. In any case, there are several crossings on Basin Creek, and most require getting wet.

I scoped out the final crossing, the longest, as potentially rideable but made it only three-fourths of the way. The typical problem with water crossings is not, as one might assume, the uneven, unviewable surface below, but rather which gearing to use. Too high and you stall. Too low and you spin out. With me it was the latter. A gear or two higher and I could’ve gunned my way through.

Still, I avoided soaking the Burner. And it was a warm day – wet feet weren’t going to bother me. Another strategy for wet feet BTW: smart wool socks. They dry quicker and feel dry even right out of the water.

Before the final creek crossing Jim mentioned seeing diarrhetic cow patties. I’m thinking, what the heck is he talking about? Then I notice star-shaped splats on the trail. They were dried out, fortunately, but still a bit tacky, unfortunately.

On the other side of the crossing, after jumping on Kelley Creek Trail for the final leg, we found the source. A herd of 20 or so cattle, some of them really big mothers, were grazing along the trail. We tried spooking them off, but cowpunching is not exactly our calling and we wound up piling the entire gaggle onto the trail ahead. From that point on it was a matter of hollering and waving to get the cows to keep moving ahead of us.

There was just one problem. These cows had dysentery. All of them. And I mean bad. At some points we were encountering projectile diarrhea, which quickly put us well off the pace. The trail was in a narrow ravine, providing no passing points. We were basically locked in behind these braying bovines for the duration.

Wet, splatted, intermittent cow diarrhea, it turns out, is pretty tough to avoid on narrow singletrack. Soon our frames were adorned with the stuff, and Jim’s rear wheel was kicking it up onto his back and into my face. The knobbies were picking it up in clumps and tossing it everywhere.

The physical product was bad enough, but the noxious odor just about put us into dry heaves. “This stuff makes horse manure smell like Faberge,” Jim muttered. But we were trapped. If we stopped to let them get ahead, they stopped too. If we tried walking to keep our bikes clean, our shoes got smeared with the stuff. Gawd nothing like this had ever happened to me on a mountain bike. Call me a rube, but even as a kid I hated spending time on a farm.

Finally – and I mean this slowed us down by at least half an hour – we emptied out onto the fire road, our singletrack sojourn ruined on its final descent. The cows milled around while we made our quick exit, and I don’t know where they went from there. The road was a quick spin back to the van. At that point we stopped every rider we saw and made them thank us in advance for herding the doggies off Kelley Creek trail.

It all added up to a mild anticlimax for our Sun Valley fantasy, but I was still in afterglow from the day before. And my rule on the negatives is this: It gives you something to remember the ride by. The rides that go smooth as butter quickly flee the memory bank.

It was time to say goodbye to our week of bimodal bliss. We packed up, noting that our first job upon the return to Seattle would be to wash our bikes. I thought about taking the Burner into the Downhill Zone, where I bought it, and asking them to clean it up. But that would be too cruel a joke even for the bros. After all, they use compressed air, and there’s no telling where caked-on cow dung would wind up in that scenario.

Cruising down the highway, we fell silent with our flashbacks, recollections and dreams. Sun Valley is just far enough away, and the mountain biking season just short enough, to keep it out of the casual-trip category. I see there’s another BBTC contingent heading over in September. Bon voyage, happy biking, and look for the spirits of Paul and the Lyon King on the trails!

In any case, the holidays seem like a good time to run Bike Intelligencer “Classics” — that is, stories from our archives enabling readers to dream the big dreams about next spring, summer and fall. At the end of the day, all we have are our stories. If they involve bikes, they have to be good.

We’ll start with hands down the most memorable mountain bike adventure we’ve ever had, our 5-day stint in the Sun Valley-Stanley region of Idaho the summer of 2003. Because there isn’t much for the big-hit crowd in Sun Valley, it typically gets overlooked in a compendium of great MTB rides. Yet for everything BUT big hit, it’s the best place to ride phat. I took along the camcorder and helmet cam, and YouTube links are provided, but please forgive the lousy resolution. This is ancient equipment by today’s standards — the helmet cam alone took 8 AA batteries and didn’t even give TV resolution. Still, our humble package gives you an idea of the gut-sucking sweep of Idaho’s XC joys.

Sex, MTB and Rock ‘n Roll

Continuing our Idaho adventure, we head toward Stanley and ride the best XC downhill this side of the Tahoe Rim Trail. Oh! Oh! Oh! Idaho!

I’m not one of those people who subscribes to XYZ being better than sex. You know, chocolate is better than sex. Paragliding is better than sex. Yoga is better than sex. Say all you like, analogize from here till Tuesday. Nothing, really, is better than sex.

But when it comes to the Boundary Creek loop above Stanley, Idaho, the line gets very very thin.

On their Idaho tour a couple of weeks earlier, Anthony and Mire had ridden a route up Boundary Creek and down Martin and Williams Creek trails just south of Stanley. Mire’s mention of a 12k top-out perked up my ears. I’ve only been at 12k once on a mountain bike, above Telluride. The prospect of getting that far up had me asking what, where and how?

Anthony tipped us to talk to the folks at Elephant’s Perch in Ketchum about the ride, and we got the low-down. It didn’t look too complicated, but it’s not a ride talked about or written up much. There’s a blurb in the appendix to “Good Dirt,” a book of mtb rides around Sun Valley (John Zilly apparently doesn’t sell his guides there any more), but otherwise nothing to indicate the magnificence and splendor of this glorious quest.

We got up early, broke camp and headed out for Stanley, a tiny backwater 60 miles up Hwy 75 from Sun Valley. We got close to the Fish Hatchery, where the EP guy had told us to turn off, but saw no signs indicating the Williams Creek trailhead. Jim wisely flagged down a pickup who gave us the word. There was a sign, yes, but only one, and it was on the north side of the entrance. The Idaho one-sign rule was still in force, but to even things out I guess they’d put this one to the north rather than the south.

I had voted, as I always do, for the van to be at the terminus rather than exodus of the ride. Since we had no shuttle, and I wouldn’t have shuttled anyway, and since I’m a former roadie and Jim rides road all the time commuting to Lynnwood High, well, you guessed right. We big-ringed it 5 miles up the highway to the Boundary Creek trailhead. On the way Jim’s chain was skipping annoyingly, but on the telltale every third turn of the crank. That said sticky link, and with my Park tool I soon had it unstuck. I carry a full chain tool because the multis and cheapo tools tend to break the first time you use them, and you don’t want that to happen at 12k in the middle of nowhere.

Boundary Creek has a nice map-board at the trailhead, and from what we could tell the instructions du jour were, “Bear right.” We started climbing some pleasant singletrack that kept getting steeper and looser as we ascended. At one point we passed a couple of hikers and chatted. The guy told us he was a Colorado forest ranger who’d just retired after working his final year 1 day on, four days off. The reason: He’d wanted to retire but had 28 days of vacation and 57 days of sick leave, which they said he had to use before retirement could become official. So he stuck around working 8 hours a week for a year, but getting paid full-time. Now there’s a shift we all could use.

Up higher we ran into a couple young guys on a group hike, looking for their sidekick Pat. We told them we’d seen no sign of anyone and wondered how they’d gotten fragmented. At one point the trail breaks out on a scenic overview and you’re staring, drop-jawed, at the Sawtooth Mountains, looking so close you could almost cut your finger on them. The Sawtooth’s jagged relief makes it one of the most dramatic mountain ranges you’ll ever see. I’ve seen other Sawtooths around, including the North Cascades version, but this is the real deal. Jim kept saying, “Them there’s purty mountains.” With the constantly changing play of shadow on stone, they look different every time you view them.

Boundary Creek is one of those trails that gets tougher as it gets higher. At one point it intersected with the Casino Creek Trail and we ran into another contingent of the Lost Boys expedition. Not sure how experienced these folks were, and it seemed to be a Boy Scout kinda hike. They’d been up there for five days, camping out and doing the grand tour. But for them to get scattered all over the mountain seemed like sure folly. We told them we’d already run into the group down trail and wished them luck. “You’ve still got another 1,000 feet or so up,” one of them warned.

It was a lot of pushing. Even if it weren’t loose and stair-step rocky, the trail was too steep to ride in many places. Along the way we ran into a third group, the tail-draggers, and went through the Hike Update once again. “I don’t envy you guys riding that trail up ahead,” one of them warned us. “It’s a killer.”

Finally we topped out at 9,540 feet with a spectacular view of Casino Lakes, White Cloud Mountain and environs. We were nowhere near 12k, but one can understand Mire’s euphoria. You definitely feel up there. And let’s face it, the highest you can get (legally) in Washington State is 8k at Angel’s Staircase. At that elevation, 1,500 feet can make a big difference.

What I’m about to say about the rest of the ride is considered opinion. I don’t like to declare “the best this” and “the greatest that” because there are usually far too many variables in the equation to issue superlatives, and a lot of it comes down to personal taste anyway. The Boundary/Williams ride down ranks with my favorites anywhere. It’s very reminiscent of the Tahoe Rim Trail, with a lot of bouldery drops and rock gardens, twisty, fast singletrack, sandy subalpine trail conditions in great shape, all sloped downward enough so you don’t have to pedal much but not so steep that you lose your elevation too quickly. I was really riding in an altered state. The downhill goes on and on and on and just gets better and better and better.

At one point we stopped at an unnamed alpine lake and I quickly jumped in for a swim. The water was right at 72 degrees, almost swimming pool temperature (I like swim water on the cool side), the sun was shining, the lake was window-clear to its bottom. All was right with the world. Jim tried to snap my picture but timing on a digital camera is always dicey. He caught the splash at least.

At one point there’s a false spur veering off on a radical right into the bush (hey, sounds like I’m making a political statement here). Jim kept checking the topo map to make sure we were on track, but for once I wasn’t worried. I could stay lost on this ride for days and be happy as a toad in slime. We hopped onto Martin Creek Trail, which emptied out eventually in a big green meadow. Crossing that we came to Pigtail Creek and took some doubletrack to a ramshackle cabin ruins, the intersection with Williams Creek, which comprises the downhill bomb run of the hugely popular Fisher Creek ride.

More buff singletrack, more speed, more adrenalin. The Billy Idol song, “Rebel Yell,” started winding through my head (“She cried, More! More! More!”) You can’t rock ‘n roll any better than this. At the end you exit onto a dry marsh, then climb a little bluff, and you’re back to flying down the trail once again. I wish I could describe more exactly the experience but consider this: As I type these words, I’m smiling and laughing and feeling amped and warm all over. If you ever go anywhere in the vicinity of Sun Valley, this is the one ride you must do.

Back at the trailhead we whooped in delight and began chattering away in loud voices, recounting turn after berm after riser after slam. A group of girls in halter tops in the van next door kept looking over. Finally one asked, “Hey, didja have a good time or something?”